


A Lesson I Wanted to Teach

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [209]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternative Universe - Kingdom, Bodyguard, F/M, M/M, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 10:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17078981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: Steven is impulsive and ill-governed; not at all right for a soon-to-be-king. So his father assigns him asoldat.





	A Lesson I Wanted to Teach

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Realizing I've never written Shrinkyclinks.

“I don’t like it when you speak to me that way.”

“I know. But someone has to. Otherwise you would think of running wild.” His _soldat_ laps at his throat, that scolding tongue warm and lush. “Someone needs to be keeping you in line.”

Steven’s head knocks back against the wall and he grips the man’s hair, pulls it taut in his fingers, tighter. “And that someone is you, is that it?”

A hum, a flex of a powerful hand at his hip. “Is my job. You know that, _милая_. Why else would you fight me so hard?”

“I don’t fight you.”

“You do.” The _soldat_ chuckles, the soft lines of his mouth turning teeth. “Every moment of every day.”

Steven was eighteen, a man in his own right, a few years and the final fade of his father’s health from becoming a king. But he was also impulsive and prone to fits of temper and, in his father’s eyes, in many of the ways that counted, ill-prepared to rule anyone, including himself: hence the ever-present _soldat_.

He was a foreigner, which had surprised Steven; he’d assumed his father would choose a loyal man, a known subject, to be his bodyguard. But his father--infirm as he was now, his thin frame fading faster with each passing year--was far wiser about such things than Steven had given him credit to be.

“One of our people,” his father had said, “you would find a way to manipulate. I know you, son; you would not hesitate to trade on their fondness for you--or else you would be pliant honey to their face and stubborn steel the moment they turned their back on you.”

Steve had shaken his head, as much to keep the laughter from his face as to ape at contrition. “Oh, Father. Do you think so little of me?”

“Little? No. You are as much your mother’s son in spirit as you are mine in appearance.” The king had smiled fondly, his attention for a moment far, far away, as it often was when he spoke of his queen. “She too had the ability to...charm, shall we say, even when being straightforward would have been easier. Or more logical, at least. An excellent quality for a consort, I found, but less effective, I think, in a ruler.”

In that moment, in his father’s resolution, he’d seen his freedom slipping away: the hours he spent roaming the streets with Sam, both cloaked from their head to their boots; the long, wild rides through the countryside with Margaret, his father’s Master of the Horse; the time he was supposed to devote to learning statecraft bent instead to his pencils and his sketchpad--all these pleasures slipping like petals from his hand.

In a panic, he switched tactics; snapped:  “I don’t need a nurse minder, your highness.”

His father had laughed, settled back on the throne and laughed until his breath would not come. “Of course you do!” the king had said, reedy, a smile stretched across his gaunt face. “Or so I’ve always thought. But for now, you’ll settle for a personal guard who will answer to me, not to you.”

Even with the forewarning, though, the weeks of pointless arguments, the day the _soldat_ had arrived had come as a shock. He was younger than Steven had anticipated--only older than he by a decade or so--although the hardness of his face and the metal machine that took the place of his left arm spoke of a life very different than that of the prince.

“It was taken from me,” he said without flinching; a story, then, he’d told a hundred times before. “And this, it was given to me in its place.”

Steven found himself staring at the mechanical fingers, the neat rows of ever-adjusting metal plates that rippled and shifted, it seemed to him, as would one’s own skin. “Have you had it a long time?”

The _soldat_ chuckled. “Almost as long have I lived with it as I had life before. So yes. A long time.”

When he smiled, when Steven looked up and saw the corners of the man’s mouth lifted, there then, he realized, was the most striking trick of all: for the _soldat,_ his  _soldat_ , was lovely. His hair was too long to be fashionable and his clothes were all wrong and he represented the first check on Steven’s behavior that he’d known in his life but--he met Steven’s eye and smiled again--dear gods, Steven thought, at least the chains that bound him to propriety were beautiful. It might not be so hard to be good if the _soldat_ ’s company were his reward.

His heart raced and tried to be in the right place but his bent towards appropriate behavior could only last so very long. Three weeks, to be exact. Nearly a month before he’d tried to sneak out; before he’d waited for the long still hours of the night to descend before he send a whippoorwill’s call from his window and waited for the wind to bring its return.

It had, and oh, how pleased he’d been. Margaret had gotten his message, passed from hand to trusted hand from the kitchen through the halls and the gardens and down to the stables:

 _Two on the clock_ , it said. _Shall we travel again to the stream_?

And now she waited for him just beyond the garden wall on a quick, quiet mount; waited to carry him swift to the stream beyond the foothills where the moon lay in thick waves upon on the grass, where the light would catch her hair when she unbound it so it fell over her shoulders and over the firm cream of her breasts. He’d moaned soft at the thought of it, having her astride him again; this many weeks without her hands upon him, her mouth, had pulled his good intentions so very thin.

His hands were on the edge of the parapet, his mind already a mile ahead, when he’d been snatched about the waist and thrown hard to the floor.

“Where is it you are going?” the _soldat_ said.

“Out.”

“No.”

Steven sat up, his scowl cut through by a wince. “Yes. I have a date.”

“Tsk. A date. No, you do not. Not at this time of the night.”

“Yes, I--”

The _soldat_ regarded him. “With who is this date?”

“None of your damnable business.”

“Ah.” A tilt of the head. “This is why you are going in the middle of the night, yes? Is someone you are not supposed to see.”

He scrambled to his feet, fury kicking him off his ass. “Supposed to see? What the hell does that mean?”

“You know, prince.”

“I don’t!”

The _soldat_ had reached for him, caught his arm in a grip that was unforgiving but not unkind. “The mares in the pasture, they are not for you. In a few years, you will be king, yes? You will need a consort, not a mate of play.”

“A playmate,” Steve had said wearily as he was towed through the door, back through his sitting room, and down the hall to his bedchamber. “That’s what you mean.”

“Mmm,” the _soldat_ said thoughtfully. “I suppose yes.” He brought Steven to a halt by his bed, the turned-back sheets testimony to his aborted escape. “And now I mean no. Do you understand?”

“If you’re so smart,” Steven said, one last gasp of his dignity, “how did my message get through? Hmmm? You didn’t know I sent it, did you?”

The _soldat_ ’s mouth curled. He let Steven’s arm go. “A lesson,” he said, “I wanted to teach. That is why. Your old ways of doing things, I need you to know: they will not work anymore.”

Steven’s face burned. “You could’ve just told me you knew, instead of letting me get my hopes up.”

“Showing is better than telling,” the man said. His eyes flicked down, back up, and his smile went insolent. “And there is more than hope you have up, yes?”

“Get out!” Steven had said, humiliation turning in his mouth as fast as fury. “Get out of here, you bastard. Get out!”

The _soldat_ had held up his hands and stepped back. “I will be here,” he’d said. “Again, always. Right outside of this door. In case you decide to try again.”

He had, of course. Not that night, but many others, driven not as much by lust as by something fiercer, something more solid: a need to be right, a need to prove the damnable _soldat_ wrong.

“You’re a chain!” he’d shouted on more than one occasion. “A fucking anchor around my waist, _soldat_!”

“Tsk,” the _soldat_ would say, hauling him bodily away from what he wanted, from his latest exercise in free will. “This is my job, until you learn how to govern yourself.”

“I’m a prisoner!” he had bellowed one night as the _soldat_ spirited him away from a knights’s party, from hours of promised drunken bliss at Sam’s side. “You can’t hold me like this! You can’t tell me what to do!”

“You are no prisoner,” the _soldat_ hissed in his ear, “except to your own selfishness.”

“Oh, now you sound like my father!”

“Your father would never speak to you such. Perhaps if he had, he would not have a cur for a son.”

“You--! How dare you speak to me that way!”

The _soldat_ hauled him around the corner and kicked open a kitchen door, commenced hauling him up the back stairs. “What other way is there that you understand? Telling of no for you is never enough.”

“I’ll tell the king about this!”

“About what? His son being drunk fool? I think, Steven, he is very aware.”

He’d twisted in the _soldat_ ’s grip, heard the whir of those metal gears, felt the pinch of metal through his tunic and into his flesh. “Stop talking to me like I’m a child.”

The _soldat_ slammed to a halt on a small landing and squeezed Steven against him, his voice, his arms choking and tight. “When you stop acting like one,” he said carefully, softly, a snake’s rattle in each and every word, “then, I promise. I will.”

That night, Steven’s dreams had drowned in mead, had sunk beyond the resentment of the everyday and settled in the sand of sucking want, of devouring, of Margaret’s dark head buried between his legs, long hair brushing his thighs as she took all of him in her mouth but then her eyes brightened, faded from rich brown to soft blue and suddenly it was the _soldat_ his dream saw there, head bobbing, hands heavy stones on each hip, a rumble in his throat that Steven could feel in his prick and when he awoke, he was working himself against the bed, straining, the last of the dream still caught in his teeth and the _soldat_ rubbed steel against his clench, the shock of cold a counterweight to the heat of his mouth and Steven came with a sob, a great wrench of his hips, a pulse of wet in the sheets as if he were a boy again, his own pleasure outside of his control.

It had been then that he had realized, through the muddled state of his body, his brain, that perhaps what he wanted from the _soldat_ was not solely respite: it was a very particular kind of relief.

And if said relief led in the end to him finding an opening, an alternative way around his father’s strict plans, well then, he’d thought, a sated smile on his lips. So much the better.


End file.
